


All the Sailor Boys Have Demons

by redonthefly



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Flashbacks, Gen, M/M, POV Second Person, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-31
Updated: 2014-12-31
Packaged: 2018-03-04 11:16:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3065858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redonthefly/pseuds/redonthefly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They are more prophetic than they know, green khaki men, chests gleaming flashes of bronze and stripes of color - peacocks, the boys say, all puffed up - they can’t know (shouldn’t, couldn’t) how well they write your future when they push a rifle into your hands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All the Sailor Boys Have Demons

**Author's Note:**

> Very slight references to self-harm, also brief Winter Solider-esque violence, though it's largely metaphorical. 
> 
> Title is from 'Sailor Song', by Regina Spektor.

It surprises you when Italy is verdant.

Somewhere along the line - the line is probably toast and sweet dried tomatoes, capers and stuffed pepper blossoms from Little Italy; you can taste it maybe, if you try hard enough - you imagined this place with white granite statues and dust and bricks cracked in the sunshine, endless summer.

It’s cold.

Wet too, and muddy, and you exhale clouds that freeze, frost the pine needles, the iron smell of ice on everything. It makes you sharp.

This is how it is: bright and harsh and clear, the pop-pop-pop of a gun, men dropping to the ground, cut flowers and stems bleeding green. You used to like the scent of grass freshly cut, before metal and earth took the same flavor.

Killing fields, indeed.

You’ve never been good at growing things.

Black thumb.

**

Winter is a season, quarterly. Once a year: swift nights, cold whispers in the dark.

You’re the whisper now, the wisp, the shadow. Silver slips of moonlight, a reflection in steel knives and the crimson star on your shoulder; you’ve seen it, the reflection of yourself, starkly drawn.

Your winters last longer, seem colder - the summers briefly loud and hot, sticky like the blood that gets caught in the grooves of your palm, so short, so short.

You lose your reflection, more and more, become a stranger to yourself, an angled face in a round window, before frost creeps in around the edges.

There is the vaguest sense that this is wrong, that you are missing springs and autumns, that there was a time when you were not so cold.

Knives at your hips, pistol holstered at your side; this is winter, they say. The final season.

**

Your legs can run for miles, shoulders broaden, stomach tightens. Laced up in combat boots, putty shaped for the army, carving away at your face. Bootcamp eliminates boyhood.

(Home home home, you are thinking, always. Hope to heaven they recognize you when you get there.)

The body adapts, takes the mind with it. Eventually, you get used to the feeling of your finger on a trigger, cold metal warming under your skin, the tension as you squeeze becoming infinitesimal.

Let out all your breath.

Settle.

Be still.

 _Shoot_.

James Barnes is a natural sniper, they say. He has the eyes. He has the hands.

(The heart? He can learn that.)

They are more prophetic than they know, green khaki men, chests gleaming flashes of bronze and stripes of color -  _peacocks_ , the boys say,  _all puffed up_  - they can’t know (shouldn’t, couldn’t) how well they write your future when they push a rifle into your hands.

**

When you are very young - still small enough for a cap on your head and haphazard curls a little too long around your ears, buck toothed,  _so young_  - a bird gets trapped in your bedroom.

Pigeon maybe. More likely a starling.

(It was so long ago, then.)

Steve thinks is came in through the fire escape, propped open all day where you left it while gone to school. You spent all morning half hanging out to hear the music from your neighbor’s new radio - no static, the sound clear and pure, unlike the tinny modulating melodies cranked out of the one in your living room, older than you - were almost late from it, your head craned out while you were supposed to be finishing your math figures from the night before.

Blank notebook.

Full heart.

You lost your cap in the alley below.

The bird circles the room for hours and all you can do it watch, laying on your bed while it flies in frantic circles over your head, waiting for the moment when it gets so tired, so scared that it finally stops and rests on your dresser.

Steve is there, of course. He wraps it in your second best handkerchief and sets it gently on the window sill like a treasure, an offering.

It’s gone in the morning, flew away sometime in the night you suppose, after your eyes became too heavy to watch the little bundle any longer.

You can’t remember if it sang, ever.

Not likely.

It’s hard to sing when you’re frightened and alone, when your world becomes four blank walls, when the sky is just a memory, the window an illusion.

Your mother is mad that you’ve lost your cap and your handkerchief, but you can hear that radio playing when you go searching the alley for them, notes lingering high against the early evening stars, and they sound for all the world like birdsong.

**

You learn that a lot of things taste like electricity, dry and metallic on your tongue, the spread heat of it inside your cheeks, burning you up.

They tell you not to bite.

_Don’t chew._

Chastise your bitten lips, the raw red cuticles on your right hand. What they can’t see is the clarity, the focus in pain, the blinding light of it.

Brain fires (poppoppop) rapid, fingers whirring, jammed into a wall, a throat, locks crumbling at your feet.

They bred you for pain, after all.

**

The first time you kill a man it is 1943, July.

Or perhaps it is 1954, October.

(It all depends on how you count, when you start, when life begins, not 1918 for certain, you’ve been reborn so many times since then. It doesn’t matter anymore anyway.)

You remember everything, also nothing somehow, this is purgatory, penance for how heavy your arm felt, the sing of a bullet, the solid meaty  _thwack_ , the low tumble of a body meeting the ground.

 _Conditioning_ , you hear them say. Them: fellow soldiers, friends? Too far to hear. The mind fills in the blanks.

You know better. Your ears are sharper, always have been. Eyesight too.

They pin something on your lapel and it weighs more than your gun, heavier than the expression on another man’s face (shock, surprise, momentary bewilderment - there are many, always) the minute space before pain arrives, before death, when the spray of blood on the wall could be anyone’s.

Must be ‘54 then. You know the look already.

Must be ‘45. You feel grief.

Your mind fills in the blank spaces too. Blue like sky, pure white snow and red, red, red.

**

Thing is, Steve says ‘come on,’ and you will, always, for pie or a punch.

Brooklyn is hot, steaming in summer, and it will always be like this - there is an eternity of Augusts when you are 16 years old, when the world is wide and open and sitting on God’s open palm waiting for an enterprising soul to snatch it up and run away, but so small still: so very close, your kingdom come in four blocks, the penny theater and the Polish grocery and Marcie Givens’ nylons hanging from her clothesline for the whole neighborhood to see, all the women tutting and muttering, and Steve waving at you.

_Come on, Bucky. Come on._

You do.

You always do.

There’s nothing like being 16, when years slip by in afternoons, and the stories in the comics herald aliens and moonwalkers, and the heroes that escape certain death in every issue, and Steve laughing at you for devouring them, teasing.

_Would’ja follow me into the jaws of death, Buck?_

(You would. You will.)

 


End file.
